Meet The Parents
As a single guy I know there's few things in life more uncomfortable than meeting your girlfriend's parents. You have this feeling that in the back of their minds they're thinking, "This is the guy who's corrupting my daughter." After years of movies and sitcoms with stories about this experience you tend to psych yourself into the worst, most nerve-racking scenario possible about meeting the parents. Thankfully, what actually happens isn't as bad as you had expected unless you're Ben Stiller in "Meet The Parents" where just the opposite happens. He goes in thinking positively and Murphy's Law takes over. The result is a funny but somewhat familiar comedy.
Stiller stars as Greg, a male nurse who works in the ER of a Chicago hospital. He's been dating Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo), a kindergarten teacher, for over 10 months and is totally smitten by her. The opening scene shows us Greg's love for Pam is true because he's about to propose to her in a rather unique way. It's cute and funny (it involves little kids trying to spell) but due to some circumstances he aborts it at the last second when he realizes he's never met Pam's parents and gets the feeling they're the old fashioned type who would forever malign him if he didn't get their blessing first.
Greg and Pam fly to one of Long Island's many upscale suburban towns - not unlike those neighborhoods from all the 1980s John Hughes comedies. The only reason this story doesn't take place there too is because there's a few crucial plot points and funny jokes that could only happen at an airport.
Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner costar as Jack and Dina Byrnes and make for really convincing parents. You get the feeling they're a close family from their hospitality and how well they get along with each other. Greg feels welcome at first but he's still nervous because of what Pam has told him about her overprotective father. When she throws his cigarettes on the roof of the house he's already pretty freaked out and it's a mentality he's never able to snap out of (and with good reason).
What ensues is a mixture of many formulas of commercial comedy. It's slapstick, it's one-liners, it's sight gags... and anything and everything else that involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time saying the wrong thing while doing the wrong thing. You get the feeling you've seen these things done before, and you have but only individually. "Meet The Parents" is not a carbon copy of any one movie, sitcom or specific plot - it's a hybrid of many of them and it works rather well.
I'm not even sure how I would go about describing and analyzing the comical elements here. This is a big-budget Hollywood comedy directed by Jay Roach - the guy who brought us the "Austin Powers" movies, and his strategy here isn't all that different. The jokes are funny, they don't have a lot of setup for their execution to pay off (although there are quite a few long-running and foreshadowed jokes which work for the most part). Unlike the "Austin Powers" films which had much derivative British humor, "Meet The Parents" invokes more American humor. It's all about a nice guy who tries his hardest just to make his girlfriend's parents like him after he says or does something embarrassing that proceeds to compound after he tells a little white lie to try to get himself out of the corner he has backed himself into.
The chemistry between Stiller and De Niro is great, one of the best father-and-son-in-law relationships I have seen. De Niro's Mr. Byrnes is a passive guy who rarely yells or loses his temper but you get the feeling that at any given moment he could snap and rip Greg's head off. Byrnes is constantly on Greg's case, busting his chops whenever he says something without properly thinking it through first (mostly for his own amusement, not because he's a mean codger or anything). The scene in which Greg claims he milked a cat is funny in and of itself but De Niro closes the scene with a hilarious one-liner. He upstages Stiller and humiliates the character Greg in one nonchalant breath. Who says De Niro can't do comedy with the best of them?
Watching this film I made a mental list of other comedies I could compare individual aspects to: "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation;" any given episode of "Frasier;" "Father Of The Bride;" "Planes, Trains & Automobiles;" "There's Something About Mary;" and a few others I can't think of now. And I just want to make it clear that I don't think this movie is ripping off any of these works, it's just reminiscent of them.
"Meet The Parents" works because every character and his or her actions and reactions are convincing in every situation they're thrown in to.
GRADE: B
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